The Limits of Rahmism

AS A DOZEN or so top White House officials gathered in Rahm Emanuel’s corner West Wing office one morning in early January, the president’s political director, Patrick Gaspard, reported on the latest poll numbers in Massachusetts. With less than two weeks until a special Senate election, the Republican candidate was gaining momentum — just nine percentage points behind the Democrat in a new Rasmussen survey. The Democrats were in danger of losing the seat held for nearly half a century by Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

Emanuel, the provocative and profane White House chief of staff, slammed his hand down on the table and shook his head with seething exasperation. He did not yell, according to others in the meeting, but his thoughts were obvious. How had this happened? What the bleep was going on? He ordered calls made to Massachusetts and the Senate Democratic campaign committee to assess the situation. “We’ve got to get up there and take it over,” Emanuel told colleagues. As the election got closer, Emanuel and David Axelrod, the president’s senior adviser, arranged for President Obama to rush up to Massachusetts for a last-minute campaign trip.

It made no difference. The Republican, Scott Brown, who campaigned by driving a pickup truck around the state, was riding a tide of popular anger that would dramatically end the opening chapter of the Obama presidency. By the time Election Day arrived on Jan. 19, Emanuel tried to prepare the White House senior staff, during its 8:30 a.m. meeting in the Roosevelt Room, for the storm of second-guessing that was about to hit. “I’ve been in a White House before when we lost both the House and the Senate in ’94,” he said, according to notes taken separately by two people in the room. “In about 12 hours, we’re all going to be stupid. Like Axe says, you’re never as smart as they say you are when you win, and you’re not as stupid as they say you are when you lose. We were smart before. Now we’ll be stupid.”

The stupid season has arrived for Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel, the unlikely tandem of inspirational leader and legislative mechanic that was supposed to enact the most expansive domestic program since the Great Society. After the debacle in Massachusetts that cost Democrats their supermajority in the Senate, Washington has engaged in a favorite exercise, conducting the autopsy before the body is actually dead. How had it come to this? How did the president’s legislative drive drag on for so long that the surprise loss of a Senate seat could unravel it? Did Obama make a mistake by disregarding his top adviser’s counsel? Or was it Emanuel who failed to execute the president’s strategy? Was it both, or perhaps neither?

As Emanuel put it the morning of the Massachusetts election, the final judgments will depend on the final results. If the president and his chief of staff manage to salvage their ambitious campaign to overhaul health care in the next few weeks — a proposition the White House privately put at 51 percent as the month began, according to an official — then, as Emanuel said, they will be seen as smart all over again. But that 49 percent chance of failure could devastate Obama’s presidency, weaken Democrats heading into the fall midterm elections and trigger an even fiercer, more debilitating round of finger-pointing inside the administration.

The paradox of the current situation for Obama and Emanuel has not been lost on Washington. A visionary outsider who is relatively inexperienced and perhaps even a tad naïve about the ways of Washington captures the White House and, eager to get things done, hires the ultimate get-it-done insider to run his operation. Obama was enough of a student of history to avoid repeating the mistakes of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, who came to reform the capital and installed friends from home who did not truly understand it as their top White House aides. But if picking the leading practitioner of the dark arts of the capital was a Faustian bargain for Obama in the name of getting things done, why haven’t things got done?

By the end of his first year, Obama expected to have revamped the nation’s health care system, restructured its energy industry to curb climate change, reined in Wall Street with a new regulatory structure, closed the prison at Guantánamo Bay, signed an arms-control treaty with Russia, begun rapprochement with Iran and jump-started the Middle East peace process. Instead, the president’s approval ratings have fallen by more than 20 percentage points, unemployment remains higher than even the worst initial White House forecasts and much of the president’s agenda is stalled. Most significant, the fate of Obama’s signature health care initiative is uncertain. “What looked like it was going to be a huge achievement for 2009 became a huge challenge for 2010,” Anita Dunn, the former White House communications director under Obama, told me. “Obviously, the landscape looks a lot different heading into the second year.”

If Emanuel’s philosophy is to put points on the board, to take what you can get and then cut a deal, to make everything negotiable except success, then the White House is testing the limits of Rahmism. For 14 months, the president has struggled with the balance between that pragmatism and the idealism of his campaign. At times, he disregarded Emanuel’s advice to scale back his goals, particularly on health care. At others, he has sacrificed campaign positions in hopes of achieving a compromise. “There’s a constant tension between the need to get things done within the system as it is and the commitment to change the system,” Axelrod told me last month. “Finding that line at any given moment is really, really difficult.”

In choosing his chief of staff, Obama concluded that what he needed was someone who was not like him in temperament or political instinct. With only two years in the Senate before effectively leaving town to run for the presidency, Obama needed a guide through the labyrinth of Washington. “He really wants Rahm in that position because he trusts him,” Ray LaHood, the transportation secretary and a close friend of Emanuel’s, told me. “If Rahm tells him to make a phone call or to do something, he knows that it’s probably a good thing to do.”

It is hardly a relationship of dependence and deferral. These are two strong-willed individuals. Yet for all the focus on Emanuel lately, Obama calls the shots. When Obama makes a decision at variance with Emanuel’s advice, Emanuel does what staff members do and adopts the decision as his own. “Rahm Emanuel is not telling the president what to do,” said Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the House majority leader. “Rahm is not somebody who is running over the president of the United States. The president is making the decisions.”

In this season of discontent for Obama, Emanuel has emerged as the leading foil, the easy and most popular target for missiles flung at the White House from all sides. He is the bête noire of conservatives who see him as the chief architect of Obama’s big-government program and of liberals who consider him an accommodationist who undermines the very same agenda. The criticism has been searing and conflicting. He didn’t work enough across party lines. He tried too hard to work across party lines. He pushed for too much. He didn’t push for enough. The crossfire underscores his contradictions — how can Emanuel be so intensely partisan without being all that liberal and so relentlessly pragmatic without being bipartisan? And just as salient these days, how can he be so independent-minded and still remain loyal to a team operation?

After a series of attacks last month came articles in The Washington Post and elsewhere defending Emanuel, which in a way was worse for him, because it fed suspicions that he was secretly disparaging the president and colleagues. None of his closest friends believe he would deliberately do that, but all the attention on him lately has stirred widespread grumbling inside the White House about the violation of the “no-drama Obama” ethos cultivated during the campaign. Even some of Emanuel’s friends are aggravated at the perception that White House officials are taking shots at one another. As for Obama, “he’s irritated by the stories,” a top aide told me, and Emanuel has “expressed regret” to the president.

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In Flight Emanuel and other administration staff members on Air Force One.Credit
Pete Souza/The White House

Emanuel, who declined to talk to me on the record for this article, generally shrugs off most of the commentary, scorning armchair critics who haven’t spent time in the White House or Congress actually trying to accomplish something. But at least some of this is bravado. “He is obviously going through a tough patch,” William Daley, a former commerce secretary and a close friend, says. “Everybody wants to dump on him because they don’t want to dump on the president.” Daley told me it is eating away at Emanuel: “Contrary to what he says, this stuff does bother him. He cannot fail. And if he thinks people think he failed, it depresses him. He can’t stand the thought that he’s failed, and he’s hearing that from too many people now.”

ONE DAY LAST MONTH, Congressional leaders of both parties shuffled into the Cabinet Room of the White House for the first of what Obama now promises will be monthly bipartisan meetings. Young aides asked the staff members to surrender their BlackBerries, as is typical for meetings in the West Wing. Yet while the president and the leaders talked through their issues, there was Emanuel, staring down and typing away.

At a meeting of the president’s economic team a few weeks ago, though, Emanuel called out Lawrence Summers, the head of the White House National Economic Council, for obsessively working his BlackBerry. “Hey, Larry, are you winning or losing that game?” Emanuel teased, according to a person in the room. “In my house when my kids do that, we take away their things. I’m not going to do that, I just want to know if you’re winning.”

Emanuel occupies a unique niche in Obama’s White House. He makes up the rules of the game that others are supposed to follow, and he gets away with what others cannot. Emanuel seems to serve as a virtual prime minister, the most powerful chief of staff since James Baker managed the White House during Ronald Reagan’s first term. Baker was also an experienced, savvy operator who took the arrows for his boss. Just as Emanuel is often criticized by the left for steering Obama toward the middle, Baker was considered a moderate who tempered Reagan’s more conservative instincts. “Let Reagan be Reagan” was the cri de coeur against Baker. “Let Obama be Obama” is the thrust of the liberal critique of Emanuel. What that fundamentally misses, of course, is that Reagan and Obama chose their chiefs of staff to serve exactly the roles they did.

Emanuel cultivates his ferocious, dead-fish-sending, profanity-spewing, Rahmbo reputation because it serves his interests as well as the president’s. At 50, he has the coiled energy of aides half his age, still as wiry thin as he was during his improbable days as a ballet dancer. He meets with Obama at the beginning of each day and again at the end, in between dipping his hands into virtually everything the White House does, from economic policy to national security. In any meeting with the president, he sits to Obama’s left and is typically called on at the end to summarize arguments and present his recommendations. He works the phone and e-mail with energy, staying in touch each day in staccato fashion with a dizzying array of lawmakers, officials, lobbyists, journalists and political operatives. Descriptions of his style almost always seem to include some sort of martial reference.

“Hand-to-hand combat,” as Daley describes it.

“A heat-seeking missile,” in Axelrod’s words.

Although he is a policy wonk in his own right, Emanuel is far less concerned about the details of a bill than the ability to get it passed. Can he find 60 votes in the Senate and 218 in the House for this? He pushes for as much as he can, and when he judges he has as much as the system will give him, he cuts a deal. “He’s a Malcolm X Democrat — by any means necessary,” Paul Begala, a longtime friend from the Clinton White House, says.

That approach is at the heart of the dominant conflict inside the current White House. When Obama ran for the presidency, liberals saw him as the crusading head of a movement to sweep in a new era of progressive policies on health care, climate change and national security, while independents and some Republicans saw him as a sort of postpartisan figure who would reach across party lines and end the ideological polarization of Washington. Inevitably, of course, he could not be both. Instead he has managed to disappoint both sets of believers. Emanuel’s operation grapples with that disconnect every day — how far to push on stimulus spending, on health care, on Wall Street regulation? One day, Obama is saying he will sign no health care bill without a government-run “public option”; the next, he all but drops it. One day, he is bashing the “shameful” bonuses for “fat-cat bankers” at bailed-out firms, the next he is serving dinner to corporate titans at the White House and saying he does not “begrudge” the big payouts.

“There’s a basic tension in the White House between the pragmatic, let’s-get-it-done view and the people who want fighting,” a senior administration official told me, insisting on anonymity to discuss internal dynamics. “There are a whole bunch of people at the White House who want to create dividing lines between us and them. They vacillate all the time between the two, all the time between ‘let’s draw a bright line’ and ‘let’s get something done.’ ”

That has been the story of health care, the defining project of Obama’s first year as president. Along the way, Obama has been willing to be flexible on the details to the point that he switched positions significantly from his own campaign promises — giving up on the public option, embracing a mandate requiring everyone to have insurance and accepting a tax on high-value insurance plans. But when it comes to the broad sweep of his plan, to extend coverage to more than 30 million uninsured Americans, he has refused to retreat.

While publicly leading the push for ambitious change, Emanuel privately suggested from the start that Obama narrow his goals. Burned by Bill Clinton’s failure to enact his health care overhaul, Emanuel counseled the new president as he set out his original agenda more than a year ago to think about moving more strategically and incrementally, according to White House insiders and key Democrats. Bite off what can be done now and keep making forward progress. Obama disagreed and insisted on pushing for a comprehensive plan. Emanuel saluted and went off to try to make it happen. “Rahm faithfully executed that vision,” David Axelrod told me.

But when the process bogged down last summer, Emanuel went back to Obama — by one colleague’s recollection, he brought it up repeatedly during the first week of August — and pushed for a pared-back approach that would focus on expanding coverage for lower-income children and families and on reforming the most objectionable practices of insurance companies. The history of health reform, he argued, has been step-by-step, manageable progress that can win public support. Obama could come back later for more. Obama again said no. “His thinking,” Anita Dunn told me, “was: I actually do not want to play it safe on this issue. I want to get it done; and if we don’t get it done now, we won’t get it done for a very long time. And I’m not ready to fold on this. It may get to that point, but not yet.”

LIKE A LOT of reporters, I met Emanuel in the 1990s when he was at the Clinton White House. He was then, as now, aggressive, relentless and driven. He always had a pithy attack line on Republicans to share or a scooplet on some modest forthcoming presidential initiative to peddle. He liked reporters and understood what made a good story. He also understood that the relationships he was building were good for him.

Emanuel’s time in the Clinton White House prepared him for the trials of today. After alienating the wrong people with his sometimes abrasive style as political director, Emanuel was demoted, reportedly at the instigation of Hillary Rodham Clinton, but he refused to quit and rehabilitated himself by helping to push through the North American Free Trade Agreement. He lived through the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 and the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998. Along the way, he became a champion of the small-bore initiatives that Clinton used to revive his presidency, reasoning that enough modest achievements add up to something big — an approach Obama has largely resisted.

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Traffic Cop Emanuel once teased a colleague for using a BlackBerry during a White House meeting.Credit
Olivier Douliery/Epa

After leaving the White House, Emanuel returned home to Chicago to work in investment banking. I went to see him once in Chicago, visiting his fancy office in the high-flying investment firm that earned him millions of dollars in very short order. He seemed as at home with money as with politics, but it was clear as we talked that he viewed the private sector mainly as a way station before his return to the political arena, this time as an independent actor.

Soon after reaching Congress, he managed to power his way into the leadership through force of personality, past scores of members with more seniority. No one else wanted it as bad or was willing to do as much. He mastered the Congressional districts of virtually every member and took over the party’s campaign committee for the 2006 elections, recruiting moderate and even conservative candidates for districts the Democrats had not won in years. Along the way, he stayed in touch, calling me unsolicited from time to time to trade gossip or point out something about George W. Bush’s White House that he thought deserved more scrutiny from the news media. He managed to get around so much that an editor at a major newspaper at the time recalled finding Emanuel’s name on the expense account of virtually every reporter covering Washington for that paper.

By the time Obama was headed for victory in 2008, Emanuel’s name was coming up as an obvious choice to run the new White House. But he had other ideas. Just a few weeks before the election, we met for one of those expense-account dinners, and he flatly rejected any suggestion that he might become chief of staff. He had set his sights on eventually becoming speaker of the House of Representatives, keenly aware that Nancy Pelosi was approaching 70, as were the two others ahead of him on the Democratic ladder, Steny Hoyer and James Clyburn of South Carolina. Emanuel, two decades their junior, could afford to wait them out and would still have a long tenure ahead of him in the speaker’s chair. The typical White House chief of staff, he knew all too well, lasted only two years or so. And then what?

But in Washington, it’s never safe to take at face value someone who swears they don’t want a job in the White House. Either the opportunity overcomes the objections or it becomes clear pretty quickly just how hard it is to say no to the president of the United States. Just weeks after our dinner, Emanuel was in Chicago advising the new president as his incoming chief of staff. The selection rankled many in the greater Obama orbit. For all the work they put in electing an apostle of hope to clean up Washington, now they were handing over the keys to a crass, cynical operator? Even if it was a sensible decision, what message did it send?

As different as the two men are, there is something in the erudite and zenlike Obama that seems to enjoy Emanuel’s coarser side. At an epilepsy fund-raiser in Chicago in 2005, Obama, then a senator, roasted Emanuel, then a congressman, in a moment captured on video. Obama joked that Emanuel once adapted Machiavelli’s “Prince” for dance, naturally with “a lot of kicks below the waist.” He recalled the teenage accident with a fast-food meat slicer that cost Emanuel part of his middle finger, joking that it rendered him “practically mute.” Emanuel doubled over laughing. Obama, clearly enjoying the audience reaction, added: “Has he ever flashed that little stubby thing at you? It’s appalling!” He then noted that Emanuel’s brother Ari is the inspiration for the cocky Hollywood agent on HBO’s “Entourage” and joked that Rahm was more like Tony Soprano. “Rahm is a little intense, he’s strong, he’s aggressive, he’s emotional, he’s moody,” the future president said. “Thank God he is one of a kind.”

The relationship between Obama and Emanuel is commonly misunderstood, however. They are not as personally close as many assume. While they both come from Chicago and have been political allies for years, they are more friendly than friends. Emanuel never worked for Obama before he was elected president and did not go through the fires of the campaign with him, as Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett and Robert Gibbs did — he did not even endorse Obama, staying neutral between Obama, his Chicago ally, and Hillary Clinton, the wife of his former boss. Emanuel does not regularly trek up to Camp David to spend weekends with the president, nor do they play golf or shoot hoops together; in fact, Obama, an avid viewer of ESPN’s “SportsCenter,” teases Emanuel for not knowing much about sports. “He doesn’t have the personal closeness of David or Valerie or Gibbs,” Daley says.

Especially in the early months, Emanuel was wary of overstepping his bounds in Obama’s eyes, unsure exactly where the boundaries were. Even now, he worries about giving the impression of defending himself publicly at the expense of the president. “In hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands, of conversations with him since he took the job, he has never, not even once, complained about the president,” Begala told me. “He’s 100 percent loyal to the president. And I think that’s reciprocated. Barack Obama has his back.”

His back needs protection. The disaffection with Emanuel has swelled since the Massachusetts election, and the knives have come out. Each nick has led to another. An article in The Financial Times questioning the Emanuel team was followed by a slam by Steve Clemons on his Washington Note blog, which was followed by a column in The Daily Beast by Leslie Gelb titled “Replace Rahm.” Even a public rebuttal worked against Emanuel: when Dana Milbank, the Washington Post columnist, defended Emanuel and suggested that Axelrod, Jarrett, Gibbs and even the president himself were the real problems, critics accused Emanuel of orchestrating the column. But Milbank said he had not spoken with Emanuel. And such a fanciful explanation fundamentally misunderstood both men. Emanuel is unquestionably a master manipulator of the news media, but in my dealings with him since his selection 16 months ago, he has consistently sought to deny or play down differences with his colleagues. And Milbank, a longtime friend of mine, is a congenital contrarian who would bristle at any self-serving attempt to plant such a column.

Emanuel talks regularly and candidly with so many people, especially on Capitol Hill and in the media, that his point of view is well known around Washington. It does not take a leak from Emanuel to know that he favors pocketing victories when possible even if that means scaling back grander ambitions, nor are these conversations intended to undercut the president or his colleagues. Some officials in the White House are incensed at the distraction created by all the attention on Emanuel of late, but publicly, at least, they have stuck behind him. “I love him like a brother,” Axelrod told me. Gibbs says it all went with the territory. “By this point in a White House,” he said, “if you haven’t had a blog or something on the Internet stating that you should be fired, you probably should be fired.”

THE DAY THE HOUSE voted on its version of health care reform in November, Emanuel was prowling the halls of the Capitol, searching for his troops. “Where’s Lipinski?” he shouted, as a witness recalled. “I gotta find him. Did you find Lipinski for me?” Representative Dan Lipinski, an Illinois Democrat, didn’t vote for the stimulus package back in February, and Emanuel was worried that he would abandon the president again. He pressed him in the preceding days but couldn’t find him as the vote was being cast. Lipinski ultimately cast a reluctant vote for the health bill. But afterward, he released a statement saying that if the bill did not improve once it came back from the Senate for final passage, “I will vote against it.”

That was O.K. with Emanuel. One day at a time, one vote at a time. But he had less luck with another wavering House Democrat, Representative Jason Altmire of Pennsylvania, who voted no. “He was very frustrated with me personally, which he was not shy about letting me know,” Altmire told me later. The bill ended up passing, 220 to 215, just two votes more than the needed majority. Seven weeks later, on Christmas Eve, the Senate followed suit on its own version, garnering the bare-minimum 60 votes needed to overcome a Republican filibuster. And so it has gone for Obama and Emanuel. They have made more progress in passing a comprehensive health care bill than any administration in decades, but with no margin for error and next to no Republican support.

With Obama determined to pursue an expansive vision of his program, Emanuel devised a strategy predicated on avoiding what he saw as the mistakes of the Clinton effort 16 years earlier. Rather than present fully drafted bills to Congress, Obama let lawmakers take the lead in shaping legislation. Rather than fight the well-heeled health care industry, Emanuel brought lobbyists for hospitals and drug makers to the table and cut deals — in the case of the pharmaceutical industry, its contribution to the cost savings in the health care legislation would be capped at $80 billion, in effect ruling out the importation of cheaper drugs. And rather than sequencing initiatives as Clinton did — tackling one big proposal at a time — Obama moved forward across the board. For a while it seemed to be working. Within 24 days of taking office, Obama pushed through a $787 billion package of spending programs and tax cuts to revive the recession-racked economy, dwarfing any comparable stimulus package in the country’s history. The belief was that victories would beget victories. The administration would use 2009 to restructure the nation’s health care system, energy industry and financial-regulatory structure, “and then use 2010 to explain what we did,” as a White House official put it. Another official told me, “Well, it didn’t work.”

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the Republican who is probably friendliest with Emanuel in the upper chamber, says the seeds of the current difficulties were planted during the early days of the administration, when the president pushed through the stimulus without significant Republican support. Graham recalls how Senator John McCain of Arizona, the Republican presidential candidate in 2008, signed onto a $421 billion version. Had Obama and Emanuel split the difference with that plan, Graham argued, they could have had a package with Republican support. “You could have had a bipartisan bill, and our fingerprints would have been all over it,” Graham told me. “Instead, I think they were playing for a home run. They were going to jam through the biggest stimulus package ever and just pick up a couple Republicans.”

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Robert Gibbs with Rahm Emanuel, right, who abandoned a seat in the House to help run the White House. The struggle with Congress, friends say, is wearing on him. Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

Yet liberals remember that the $787 billion figure — the Congressional Budget Office recently increased its estimate of the actual long-term cost to $862 billion — was already a compromise from what they thought was necessary to rescue an economy on the brink of a new Great Depression. Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, studied options for a package of more than $1.2 trillion. Emanuel, among others, concluded that that amount was a nonstarter politically and forced a figure that started with a B, not a T. Economists on the left, most notably Paul Krugman, a columnist at The New York Times, scorned the administration for timidity.

Either way, the stimulus debate set the course. Any hope of bipartisanship seemed to fade, and each side blamed the other. “When they first came into office, I could have a meeting or two with Rahm and talk with him about the stimulus bill,” Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House Republican whip, told me. “But the conversations have been few and far between over the last six months.”

Many Democrats, including quite a few in the White House, believe the real problem was not shutting out Republicans but trying too hard to work with them. With Ted Kennedy ill, Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Finance Committee, became the lead Senate negotiator on health care and spent months trying to win the support of a few Republican senators like Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Olympia Snowe of Maine. Few in the White House were thrilled with Baucus as their point man. But they were pulled between two competing imperatives — speed and bipartisanship. Emanuel knew that the longer a big, complicated initiative like health care lingers in Congress, the more political freight it takes on, but he and Obama were also determined to get Republican votes if possible to give the effort more legitimacy, and that took patient negotiating. Axelrod told me he went into the Oval Office by himself one day in June and warned the president that the prolonged focus on health care was costing him politically. Obama said he understood, but recounted meeting a woman in Green Bay with cancer who was in debt from medical bills. He refused to scale back. “He felt it would be a dereliction of duty,” Axelrod said.

At an August meeting in the Oval Office with the six leading Senate negotiators, three from each party, Grassley asked Obama if he would say publicly that he would be willing to sign a bill without a public option, according to Grassley aides. Obama demurred, knowing that would trigger a revolt among House Democrats. For his part, the president later told his own staff that he asked Grassley if he would support the health care plan if the president agreed to what the senator was asking for. As Obama later recalled the encounter, Grassley replied, “Probably not.” (Grassley aides dispute that Obama asked that question and they told me the senator said only that it would not be a bipartisan bill unless it had 70 or 80 votes.) Much later, both camps would cite this conversation as a turning point at which it became clear that there would be no significant bipartisan accord.

Nancy Pelosi kept pressing the White House to stop dealing with the Republicans. “It’s never going to happen,” a Democratic official quoted her as saying. “Grassley’s just going to wait you out and then pull the rug out from under you.” Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who succeeded Emanuel as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told me, “Some of us concluded much earlier than the White House that Senator Grassley and the two other Republicans had clearly made a decision that they were not going to participate in a meaningful way at the end.”

After Obama rebuffed Emanuel’s suggestion to trim the scope of his health care bill, Emanuel pushed Baucus to wrap things up. “He told him, ‘You’ve got to decide whether you’re going to be chairman of the Senate Finance Committee,’ ” a Democrat close to the White House recalls. Baucus pushed back, arguing that with a little more time he could still get one or two Republicans and that would keep them from needing every single one of the 60 Democrats. But the August recess, with its Tea Party protests and raucous town-hall meetings, hardened Grassley’s position.

With the White House losing control of the situation, Emanuel summoned fellow aides to his office on the last Sunday in August for a three-hour strategy session. To recapture momentum, they concluded that the president should address a joint session of Congress. Obama agreed with the plan and even insisted they move the date up a week. “He wanted to seize the moment,” an aide recalled.

He did, but not for long. As the debate moved to the Senate floor, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, found himself held up by negotiations with fellow Democrats, as Baucus had feared, because every one was a make-or-break vote to prevent a filibuster. The deals he cut with some senators, especially what Republicans called a “cornhusker kickback” that would have given Senator Ben Nelson’s Nebraska an advantage on Medicaid financing, looked like the business as usual that Obama had vowed to end in Washington. “In the logic of Washington, the Ben Nelson deal made perfect sense,” Axelrod told me. “To the average person, it confirmed their worst suspicions about Washington.”

While many of the provisions of the health care bill were individually popular with the public, the collective size of the package — roughly $1 trillion over a decade — left some voters with sticker shock. Even though the plan was, at least in theory, paid for by spending cuts, cost savings and new taxes on wealthier Americans or expensive insurance plans, the idea of an enormous project coming after the hundreds and hundreds of billions already devoted to bank bailouts, auto bailouts and the stimulus package amid skyrocketing deficits proved too much for a lot of the public.

“They miscalculated on health care,” Daley, the former commerce secretary, told me. “The election of ’08 sent a message that after 30 years of center-right governing, we had moved to center left — not left.” Other Democrats say Obama simply overestimated his capacity to bring Republicans into the fold. “They were duped,” said a Democratic member of Congress who did not want to be identified criticizing the White House. “Maybe a little naïve. I don’t think Rahm was, but the president himself.”

Defenders of the administration’s approach say this criticism misses just how close the White House has come to achieving something that has eluded other presidents for a century. “It would be dead a thousand times before but for Rahm’s leadership,” Axelrod told me. Or as Bruce Reed, chief executive of the Democratic Leadership Council and Emanuel’s co-author on a political book, put it, “They came within one pickup truck of getting it through Congress.”

EVEN TODAY, Emanuel sometimes has a hard time talking about the Massachusetts election. Asked recently by a visitor what happened, Emanuel simply sighed and said: “I can’t. I don’t have enough medication.” The debacle unleashed a lot of pent-up frustration within the party at Emanuel — and by extension, though less viscerally, at Obama. Liberal activists told The Wall Street Journal that Emanuel had berated them at a private strategy meeting by calling their tactics “retarded” (along with another word), touching off a firestorm that led him to apologize to the head of the Special Olympics. Lost amid the focus on the so-called R-word was the context of the discussion. Emanuel was scolding the activists for running television advertisements against moderate Democrats who were not supporting the public option, neatly encapsulating the central tension between their philosophies of governing. The activists were willing to go to war even with Democrats for a policy idea they deeply cared about, while Emanuel saw that as ridiculously counterproductive.

No doubt he didn’t care much, then, for the television ad run later in Chicago by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a group formed last year to advocate for liberal candidates and issues. The ad featured a voter from Emanuel’s old Congressional district describing troubles with a health insurer. “A lot of us back home hope Rahm Emanuel is fighting for people like us as White House chief of staff,” the man said into the camera. “But if he sides with the insurance companies and undermines the public option, well, he won’t have many fans in Chicago.”

The activists were taking aim at Chicago viewers, knowing that Emanuel harbors ambitions for elective office after his White House stint is over. By assailing him at home, they hoped to make it costly for him to abandon liberal policy initiatives. Adam Green, a founder of Progressive Change, told me that Emanuel’s reputation for being strong was overblown and that the chief of staff actually had “a loser mentality” because he refused to fight more vigorously — even for progressive ideas that had popular support. “Rahm Emanuel is very, very risk-averse and afraid of a fight,” Green says. “We see him, and many people see him, as a destructive influence inside the White House, urging President Obama to cave instead of fighting for real change.” The activists are expressing frustrations that are also felt by Congressional Democrats, even if they will not say so out loud. A Democratic congressman, who refused to be identified for fear of retribution, said Emanuel didn’t pressure recalcitrant lawmakers enough. “We need a little less ballerina and a little more L.B.J.,” he told me. “For all the reputation of being able to bust knee caps, we haven’t seen nos turned to yeses.”

Jane Hamsher, the founder of the liberal Web site Firedoglake and one of Emanuel’s strongest critics, says the deal with the pharmaceutical industry was the original sin of the health care drive. Emanuel wanted to avoid the industry opposition that helped kill Clinton’s health care plan, the so-called Harry and Louise ads that undermined public confidence, and to do that he brought industry to the table. But in winning the support of Big Pharma, as Hamsher sees it, he gave away the chance to lower health care costs through imported drugs. “A lot of people feel like opportunities were sacrificed to do something really good because Rahm’s instincts are to go and strike some sort of deal,” she told me. “That’s not what Obama ran on. That’s not what people want.”

Massachusetts and health care have reinforced a broader liberal indictment of Emanuel. He has been leery of or has resisted the most aggressive efforts to overturn Bush-era national-security policies, like closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay, investigating C.I.A. officers accused of abusing detainees and taking Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to New York to try him in a civilian court for masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks. The issues pitted him against Attorney General Eric Holder and the White House counsel, Greg Craig, and eventually Craig resigned. Emanuel is not particularly vested in the substantive merits or drawbacks of the specific plans. He sees them as politically problematic, wasting scarce capital and provoking unnecessary fights on what he regards as second-tier issues that distract from higher priorities. On the other side of the ideological spectrum, Emanuel was a leading skeptic of sending another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, again at least partly out of concern that it deepened Obama’s involvement in a war that distracts from the core agenda.

He has also been at odds with minority caucuses within the Democratic fold in the House. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus and Congressional Hispanic Caucus say he does not pay attention to their issues. Hispanic lawmakers blame him for a provision inserted into the Senate health care legislation that would bar illegal immigrants from buying policies on new insurance exchanges even with their own money, and they complain that he is not putting any energy behind liberalizing immigration laws. “There are strong feelings about Rahm Emanuel among members of the Hispanic caucus,” Representative Nydia Velázquez of New York, the head of the caucus, told me. “People feel Rahm Emanuel has not been helpful in moving forward. He’s always about the numbers. He’s always about being the pragmatist. He’s always about winning.”

More loyal, personally at least, have been the members of the class of 2006 that he helped bring into office, many of them in traditionally conservative districts. Even those who disagreed with Emanuel vouch for him. “It’s unfair for people to point the finger solely at him,” says Altmire, the congressman who voted against health care. “There’s a lot of blame to go around when things like this happen. Everybody’s looking for a scapegoat.” And it is clear that Emanuel has these members’ interests at heart as he measures how far to push. He hears all the time from moderates in the House worried about the direction the president is leading them. “We call him up and say, ‘Hey, Rahm, you’ve got to push this back to the middle,’ ” Representative Heath Shuler of North Carolina told me. “He always says: ‘I hear you. I hear everything you’re saying. I’m doing everything I can.’ ”

In a way, this is a problem of his own creation. Had he not helped so many moderates win their elections in 2006, perhaps he would not have to cater to them so much, or so the theory goes. On the other hand, he and his allies point out, without those moderates, Democrats might not even control the House, making the point moot. “I analogize Rahm to Gumby: he’s got the White House grabbing both hands, both Houses grabbing both legs, all pulling in different directions,” Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida congresswoman and chief deputy whip, says. “He’s really being pulled between the bold views of the president and the mechanical reality of the Congress, which is very incremental and often slow.”

AS FRENETIC AS Emanuel is, the pace and the struggle are wearing on him in a way that friends do not recall seeing before. His nature is to be involved in everything — “Rahm can do everybody’s job and some days does,” says another White House official. While Obama has made a point of organizing his own schedule to be family-friendly, Emanuel is often at the office when the president arrives and still there when he leaves. A friend recalled a dinner party just before Christmas when Emanuel seemed on the verge of exhaustion. “He was just lying on the sofa on a Saturday night, saying, ‘I’m so tired, I’m so tired,’ ” the friend told me. The setbacks and the mounting attacks have only worsened since then. “I can see it in his eyes,” says Shuler, who runs into him at the House gym, where Emanuel still works out as early as 5:30 most mornings. “It’s taking a toll on him.”

For Emanuel, the last two months have been particularly frustrating. He finished last year boasting that Obama had the most productive first year of any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt, and now he hears all the time about Obama’s lost first year. Emanuel for months has reminded anyone who would listen of a succession of victories that, he laments, have gone largely overlooked — besides the stimulus, he points to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act expanding the right of women to sue over pay inequities; new authority for the federal government to regulate tobacco products and advertising; broader consumer protections for credit-card users; and expansion of health care coverage for children in low-income families. All of which is true enough, but they all passed in the first half of last year. It is far harder to name examples of major legislation signed into law in the past nine months.

Ever since the Massachusetts election upended their plans, Obama and Emanuel have tried to find a new path. At first, Obama sounded populist themes, hoping to tap into the anger that propelled Scott Brown to victory. But Emanuel worried that the tone was too sharp and organized a series of encounters with business leaders and business journalists to position the president more carefully as someone who shares voters’ frustration but also supports economic growth and the free market. Emanuel is said to figure that Americans still mostly like Obama and think he is on their side. “He is not seen as part of the Washington problem,” says a senior White House official. “In fact, if anything, he is seen as trying to clean it up, and the question about him is does he have the swat to get it done.” Emanuel tells colleagues that the outsider brand represents Obama’s most powerful asset, and protecting it is Emanuel’s top political priority.

To guard that reputation, Obama has spent more time traveling outside the Beltway and trying unconventional things like engaging Republicans in live televised discussions about health care and other issues. The hope is that voters will appreciate his seriousness. If at the same time, he triangulates between Congressional Republicans and Democrats a little, just as Clinton did when Emanuel was in his White House, so be it. The newfound drive for bipartisan cooperation, of course, is as much tactical as anything else. To be sure, if Republicans suddenly signed onto Obama’s legislative priorities, he would be happy to have them. But the main point is to look bipartisan to the public, particularly the independents drifting away from Democrats since Obama’s inauguration. “Rahm thinks bipartisanship is a way to get what you want — to fake bipartisanship to get what you want,” a senior administration official told me. “He understands that’s a better way to get things done than to be nakedly partisan.”

Emanuel wants to jam a wedge into the fissure inside the Republican Party between, as he frames it, the descending wing that believes in small government and the ascending wing that believes in no government. Republicans lose, in this theory, whether they cooperate with Obama or not. “We’ve got to drive the ball at them,” a senior White House official told me. “Driving the ball at them, making them pick between small government and no government, putting them in their responsibility-and-accountability box. You walk away? You’re walking away from responsibility, and the public’s angry at you. You participate? Your base hates you.”

As for Emanuel, it seems unlikely right now that he plans to walk away anytime soon, at least not before the November elections. First, Obama does not cast aside advisers during times of adversity. It would be surrendering to pressure. If they go, it doesn’t happen when the wolves are circling but only months later, as with Greg Craig, the former White House counsel, and Desirée Rogers, the outgoing social secretary. Second, Emanuel’s family moved to town last year to be with him, and he is determined to finish what he has started. Otherwise he fears the failure William Daley mentioned to me.

Does he want to run for mayor of Chicago someday? Of course. With House speaker now off the table, Emanuel would like to lead his hometown and openly communicates that to people, including his friend Richard Daley, the incumbent mayor. But Emanuel would not run against the mayor, and William Daley told me that he thinks his brother will probably run again next year when his latest term expires.

So that leaves Obama and Emanuel together in Washington, for as long as the president wants him there. If they manage to pull off health care despite the odds, Emanuel will be hailed as a savior. If not, well, he does not even allow for that possibility.

As Axelrod pointed out, “We don’t know how the story ends.”

Peter Baker is a White House correspondent for The Times and a contributing writer for the magazine.

A version of this article appears in print on March 14, 2010, on page MM36 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: What happened? The Limits of Rahmism. Today's Paper|Subscribe